Brixworth

"BRIXWORTH, a parish in the hundred of Orlingbury, in the county of Northampton, 6 miles to the N. of Northampton. It is a station on the Northampton, Market Harborough, and Stamford branch of the London and North-Western railway. Brixworth was once a market town, and the manor was held by the Fitz-Simons. The parish contains iron and other stone-quarries, and some of the inhabitants are employed in the lace manufacture. The living is a vicarage* in the diocese of Peterborough, of the value of £300, in the patronage of the bishop. The church, dedicated to All Saints, is one of the most interesting in England, with its Saxon arches formed of Roman bricks, and exhibiting every subsequent style of architecture interposed up to the time of Henry VI. Mr. Britton concluded it to have been an Anglo-Roman building, Mr. Rickman a Norman; it appears, however, as deduced by Mr. Roberts, from the edition of his book in 1835, that he then classed it amongst the Saxon buildings of the country, though not earlier than those of Barton-on-Humber and Earl's Barton. It remained for Mr. Watkins, the present incumbent, to point out the great antiquity and real character of this building, which he found, by excavations carried on with untiring energy both within and without the church, to have been built upon the foundations of a still more ancient structure, the walls and piers of which could still be clearly defined, proving it to have been originally built for a Roman basilica; or, as Mr. Watkins more explicitly defines it, "a building in which the royal and sacerdotal functions, as united in one person, were exhibited-the civil and religious authorities exercised by the same individual-the rex Anius atque sacerdos having its type in the earliest periods of most ancient nations." This hypothesis he illustrated at a meeting of the British Archaeological Association, held on the 16th of August, 1862, by reference to the foundation of a basilica in the ruins of Nineveh, as described by Mr. Layard, corresponding in its several details to that at Brixworth, and by the slabs from Nineveh in the British Museum, on which he thinks he has discovered the type of one of our Saxon arches, and beside it, on one of the blocks, a type of the Norman arch, with its chevron work. However this may be, there can be no doubt of the high antiquity of the present building, which was a venerable structure when the present south aisle was added, in the early part of the 14th century, as a chapel for Sir John de Verdun, lord of the manor, whose effigy is now enclosed in an arched recess of the south wall of that aisle. Fifty years later, the larger arch was opened, and a clerestory window above. In the north wall of this compartment a decorated and a Tudor window were afterwards inserted; the latter is now superseded by a decorated window, substituted at the time of rebuilding this wall in that part. The church contains three slabs of the 14th century; but the inscriptions are wearing out, and are now only preserved in Brydges. There were formerly some brasses, now missing. There is a chapel belonging to the Wesleyans, and an endowed school. The charitable endowments-consisting partly of the revenue of a free school founded in 1665 by Thomas Roe, and three fields-amount to £110 a year. Brixworth is the seat of a Poor-law Union. The Pytchley hounds are kept here. The principal seat is Brixworth Hall. An annual fair used to be held on the 5th June, but is now discontinued."